Fatty liver disease, more technically referred to as "hepatic steatosis," is a condition that arises when an excessive amount of fat finds its way into the liver. The word "hepatic" means that this condition involves the liver, "steato-" is a prefix that refers to fat and "-osis" is a suffix that refers to a condition or process; e.g. "fat liver process." There are two major classifications of hepatic steatosis, with the deciding factor being the presence of alcohol. Thus, a person can either have alcoholic liver disease or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
Fatty liver disease is also one of those diseases that animals, chiefly mammals and reptiles, can experience just like humans do. The leading cause in animal cases tends to come from excessive feeding.
Causes of Fatty Liver Disease
Fatty liver is a common condition with multiple origins. Excessive consumption of alcohol, imbibing more than two drinks daily, can cause this issue. This is because alcohol leaves toxic substances like aldehydes behind after the liver breaks it down.
There are many metabolic reasons as well. They include:
- Abetalipoproteinemia, a disorder that messes with fat absorption.
- Glycogen storage diseases.
- Weber–Christian disease.
- Acutely fatty liver during pregnancy.
- Lipodystrophy, a condition where the body cannot healthily manage body fat.
Nutritional causes of fatty liver disease also exist. They include:
- Obesity.
- Malnutrition.
- Nutrition from a feeding tube.
- Excessive weight loss.
- Refeeding syndrome, where an individual goes back to eating after a prolonged starvation period.
- Gastric bypass.
There are several other causes as well. Those include:
- Celiac disease.
- Inflammatory bowel disease.
- HIV.
- Hepatitis C.
- A deficiency in alpha 1-antitrypsin.
Signs and Symptoms of Fatty Liver Disease
The sad fact is that most people who develop this particular condition, no matter the form it might take, may not exhibit any symptoms at all. At best, a person suffering from fatty liver disease may feel a sense of chronic tiredness or possibly remark upon experiencing some pain isolated to the upper right area of the abdomen.
While there are barely any symptoms to this ailment, there are several complications related to it. In essence, sometimes the only clue that a person is struggling to deal with hepatic steatosis is when they go in for another problem and the battery of medical tests reveals a positive result for fatty liver disease. These complications can include cirrhosis, esophageal varices, fibrosis or even liver cancer, most commonly in the form of a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
Treating Fatty Liver Disease
Reducing a person's daily caloric intake by at least 30% has been proven to have a positive effect on a fatty liver. For people with hepatic steatosis, a weight loss regimen combining good dieting with regular exercise greatly improved the liver if not outright fixed the problem. Some cases call for medications.
Bariatric surgery is sometimes used to treat fatty liver disease but always with additional measures. Rather than fixing the patient's liver, bariatric surgery lays the foundation for most obese patients to pursue common treatment methods.
When dealing with cases where a patient developed fatty liver disease that arose from being force-fed, often intravenously, over a long period of time, choline has been known to manage many of the symptoms that arise from this condition. Choline is a salt-forming nutrient that all humans and animals need to live.